5 NO-HORSESHIT WAYS NYC HAS CHANGED SINCE 9/11
What a clusterfuck.
We all knew it was to be expected, but the deluge of bullshit 9/11 anniversary articles being crapped onto this city are making us long for Mohamed Atta’s direct, unsentimental approach.
“How has the world changed since 9/11?” these sterile Ivy Leaguers ask. Oooh, flying isn’t fun anymore. Great fucking journalism.
Bitch please, it’s 2011; flying isn’t fun? Try doing it with Xanax and an iPad. Flying fucking slays.
Here’s the truth:
New York has changed a bit, but it’s tough to tell what’s because of 9/11 and what’s due to a decade’s worth of our city’s natural progress. In some ways, they’re one and the same.
Between us, let’s strip away the horseshit and look at what’s really changed in NYC since 9/11/01:
5. MUSLIM IS THE NEW BLACK
Holy shit have NYU Muslims ever cleaned up on pussy in the last ten years.
Now, in places where Rednecks rule, like Kentucky and Abu Ghraib, strict anti-Muslim prejudice is a part of daily life. Likewise, I sure wouldn’t want to be a 20-year-old Muslim with a rucksack in any airport around the world.
But let’s get real: In New York City, amongst the left wing Daily Show intelligentsia that shapes progressive thought and gets the hottest poon, being Muslim has become a currency worth more than gold.
If you’re a young, American-born Muslim who’s learned five minutes worth of conversational politics, you can have white NYU freshman asking for your autograph and their sisters begging for your circumcised American shlong.
Muslim American in NYC? Go to college and you’ll be a celebrity, like Black People in the 1990s.
As a Muslim, you can win ANY argument in any New York setting just by raising your eyebrows and saying softly, “I’ve had a different experience.”
While nothing will ever invalidate the shock value of bringing a strong Black Boyfriend home to mom and dad’s thanksgiving table, banging hot Muslims is definitely at the bleeding edge of Y2k White Girl Rebellion.
As for their social celebrity status, successful Blacks are still powerful, but they’re just Microsoft; Muslims are Google, and Gay Muslims are Facebook: Socially indestructible.
4. THE FOURTH AMENDMENT GOT TOSSED OUT THE FUCKING WINDOW
I’m not as rabidly anti-Patriot Act as most of you academic purists. Checking everyone’s email for the last ten years let the government kill Bin Laden and more importantly, probably kept NYC from being nuked.
MTA train searches, however, are a tragic and illegal waste of time — one that I absolutely would never have foreseen.
Thank god we didn’t have these horrific subway announcements in 1993; how the hell would we have brought weed to the meadow while tripping on acid? Talk about harshing one’s mellow.
To this day, I’m not sure what happens if you’re at a checkpoint in a subway station and they find an ounce of weed in your backpack.
Is it like diplomatic immunity where they just say, “It’s not the Herb we’re looking for, move along.”
In any case, the tables set up outside subway stations are utterly worthless because if you’re a terrorist, you spot them and simply board at another station.
I once interviewed a guy who rides the train and addresses the subway car after one of these announcements comes on, in order to explain everyone’s rights under the fourth amendment.
It’s gross: This is one very stupid change that I hope the MAYOR of a future NYC will roll his Gay Muslim eyes at one day.
3. CORTLANDT STREET IS A FUCKING EPCOT
The most underrated Sarah Silverman joke is the one where she talks about her grandmother visiting her after 9/11. Her grandmother wanted to go and see Ground Zero, but Sarah Silverman couldn’t be fucked to schlep her ass all the way down to Cortlandt Street; instead, she took her grandmother to a random construction site on the Upper West Side and said, “Here we are grandma… so sad, so senseless.”
The real Cortlandt Street is out of fucking control. Jerkoffs are always taking pictures of each other there so they can go back to Holland or Cleveland with a big Facebook checkmark proving they were at our city’s mass grave. Oh well, whaddya expect.
2. ALL FIREMEN ARE WORSHIPED AS HEROES — EVEN IF THEY WERE 12 YEARS OLD AND HOME FROM SCHOOL JERKING OFF ON 9/11
A week after 9/11, I saw a Jersey SUV pull up alongside a fire truck. The SUV was packed with hot, slutty-looking New Jersey chicks who started waving to the heroic firemen. Seeing this greeting, the firemen did what super-human guys in mourning would do: They motioned for the girls to take off their tops.
The girls obliged, flashing their sweet mounds of mourning and giving us all post traumatic hard-ons.
Ten years later though, it’s fair to say that the NYFD has milked their celebrity for all it’s worth.
1. NEW YORK CHANGED THEN CHANGED BACK, PROVING IT CAN NEVER REALLY CHANGE
On the morning of 9/12/01, I was only thinking about one thing: my own ass. I was positive that New York was going to be nuked within a matter of weeks. It wasn’t romantic or tragic or emo, it was just scary as fuck and shook us up pretty bad.
If you had told me that morning that you were a horny genie and that if I blew you, you could make TEN FUCKING YEARS pass without so much as a subway gas attack, I would have swallowed you harder than hipsters swallow Loose Change propaganda.
It’s true that after 9/11, New York did change for awhile; we were in a daze, walking around being nice to each other like a bunch of jerkoffs. We were scared to leave, scared to stay, and not acting like our confident, competitive, asshole selves.
But then nothing happened. We didn’t die, and living life in an end-of-days mentality gets old fast. Like everything else, New York got bored with it. How can that compete with the iPhone, Facebook, Knocked Up and gay marriage?
The fear went away — not because we’re heroes or because we rose to any challenge, but because we have ADD and a very low tolerance for drama. So it’s time to shove the 9/11 analyses up your ass, including this one. TL;DR. Over it. What’s the next thing?
Fucking duh: 9/11 will always have a private, personal meaning to everyone who was affected, but when its over-dramatized and analyzed, it’s just to sell papers and pageloads, and real New York isn’t buying. Besides it being douchey and disingenuous, we’re just not satisfied with boring shit — this isn’t fucking Kentucky.
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